The Secret to Building a Company People Remember – Howard Schultz

in August of 87 we had 11 stores and a
hundred employees in a dream to create a
national retail company around the
coffee experience good coffee in America
but there was another dream I had and
that was to build a different type of
company a company that potentially could
achieve the delicate balance between
profitability and the fiscal
responsibility of building shareholder
value but the balance of also having a
heart benevolence and integrating a
social conscience in everything the
company would do and hopefully one day
remember this was 87 the company would
be known as much for its values its
culture its guiding principles as it
would the quality of its coffee fast
forward from 87 to 89 and 80 and 1990
the company was beginning to get some
traction we had about 50 stores we still
were not making money and I think we all
realize at the time that we were not in
the coffee business serving people but
we were in the people business serving
coffee that if we wanted to exceed the
expectations of the customer we had to
first exceed the expectations of our
people we made a very important
strategic decision early on that
franchising could not maintain the
culture and value to the company that
all it would be would be an access to
cheap capital and so we continued on
track of opening and building a company
own system